Slashdot Mirror
UK's National Rail Shuts Down Free Timetable App
JHaselden points to this "sad tale of one developer's trying time with the National Rail, the owners of the UK's train timetable data, which flies in the face of the recent assertion of Chris Scoggins (Chief Executive, National Rail Enquiries) in Wired recently stating that they had 'opened up' their data, 'often free of charge.'" This is a good case for keeping your old emails handy; the app's author uses cut-and-paste to excellent effect in his correspondence with the rail system.
Dear Riders,
Recently we've become aware of a non-commercial use of our timetables. It is our position that commercial use of these timetables is strictly prohibited and it is highly likely that any license - even those we did not require in the past - will include a charge.
Based on the facts clearly outlined above, and not our website which used to say something different, we do hereby eliminate your only way of getting live timetable and on-time updates. No, we do not provide this service for you - some poor sap does for free - and will not be doing so in the future.
Enjoy your ride,
Maj. AssHat
NR/ATOC
I wrote the CPAN module for this API, and have had a similar cool response from NRE to my request for an API token.
ATOC were investigated by the Office for Rail Regulation for possible breach of the Competition Act over this data (the full report is long, but interesting in its own way):
http://www.rail-reg.gov.uk/server/show/nav.2433
"Critical to this conclusion was that we found no evidence that ATOC’s conduct in granting access to Darwin had prevented a new product from coming to market or hampered the emergence of new technology."
I believe the ORR plans to revisit this decision at some point, to examine whether this is still true. So... if the efforts by local and central government to "persuade" ATOC to open this data do not produce results, one approach is to build as many cool, innovative apps on top of this API as possible while it still works. Then ask for licenses for them. If ATOC do not grant those licenses, the rejection notices can be handed to the regulator to show what effect this is having on development in this area.
Bizarrely, you would think it would be in the interests of the Train Operating Companies for the public to have convenient access to this data - but the association that represents them seems more interested in making a quick buck on licensing Android and iPhone apps.
TFA appears a bit sluggish (possible Slashdot effect?) so here's the text...
National Rail Have Killed My UK Train Times App
Posted on October 29, 2010 by alexmock
About a year ago I wrote a simple web application to present UK train times in a simple format for mobile phone users.
It’s best described by the instructions. The app was deliberately spartan, really just a list of upcoming trains between a collection of stations you specified in the URL. Data came from a free API which National Rail (a body representing the UK’s train companies) has run for years. Output was presented in the cleanest way possible – people on the move don’t want to be encumbered with advertising or excessive page furniture!
One neat feature was multiple start/end points. Say you live halfway between two stations (I do) and don’t care which station you travel from. The app would look up departures from both, combine and reorder them then produce a unified table of all services you could catch. When I wrote the app none of the official train timetable sites could do this and I don’t believe any can now.
Useful, huh? And all for free. I only wrote it to scratch an itch, so that rather than wading through the cluttered National Rail site I could click a bookmark on my phone and immediately know when the next train into town was. To reiterate – I built this because it was convenient and would be useful to others. Not to make a profit.
and today National Rail killed it.
So who runs this SOAP service?
The API is supplied within a website operated by National Rail – a brand of ATOC, the grandly titled “Association of Train Operating Companies”. Their name is confusingly similar to “Network Rail”, a publicly owned organisation which owns and maintains all the infrastructure. Network Rail own the track, members of National Rail / ATOC run trains on it for a profit. Confused? Good, you’re probably supposed to be.
The Live Departure Board API has existed for a few years and I’m not the only person using it. Some kind soul even wrote a CPAN module. The API is well-documented, publicly accessible and presented as something freely usable by the public. A lot of people were doing neat things with it.
It was even listed on the London Datastore site – a state-run list of open data feeds which developers are encouraged to use to provide data to web users in new and innovative ways. There was a lot of buzz around open data like this around the time of the last election.
Edit: the page on London Datastore has now been locked. “Access Denied”. Possibly because a lot of discussion appeared on there which was critical of ATOC’s decision to extract money from users of the service. Here’s the page from before ATOC’s bombshell in Google’s cache and in case that evaporates too here’s a pdf.
After writing the web app last year I had the idea of doing an Android widget to show departure times from the user’s nearest station. It would locate a user from the phone’s GPS, look up their nearest rail station then query the LDB web service to get a list of the next handful of trains they might catch. It even got as far as a Spec for Train Time Autofinder2 – complete with mockups of the widget and definitions of its functionality. Since I’m no Android programmer it’d necessitate paying a developer and I hoped to recoup that cost by selling the app for a nominal fee. I wrote to ATOC asking whether this would be okay. A month later when they hadn’t replied I wrote again, this time by registered post. Their eventual response:
“I can confirm the National Rail Enquiries Website is for personal and non-commercial use only. Therefore, the suggestion made in your letter, to utilise the data to build an Android application is expressly prohibited. I’m sorry that we cannot be of any further assistance
This information is already publicly tracked. I guess you don't travel by train or you'd know this because there are posters in all major stations advertising their two quality metrics, which are percentage of trains that ran, and percentage that ran to timetable.
Operating companies that can't hit their targets have to refund part of the season ticket price, and may lose their franchise (this has happened in the past)
The numbers got a lot better on most lines in the past years, as government funded a backlog of work on maintaining and improving railways. But that doesn't make headlines, nobody wants to hear "trains run slightly better for fifth year in a row".
Nor do station improvements. "Station closed, Thousands unable to get to work" is a headline, but "Elevators installed to make all platforms accessible to the disabled" is not. Or safety improvements. "Fifty injured in train crash" is a news item, but "No-one killed due to trains not crashing" is not.
I also see no need for these so-called 'web-services'. The entire timetable is already available in a handy 2048 page paperback format that easily fits into a medium-sized rucksack, is perfectly readable by most travellers under 30, and costs only 16 GBP! Buy it today and you'll get a whole month's use from it before it's out of date:
http://www.amazon.co.uk/GB-rail-timetable-summer-10/dp/0117063665
Bargain!